Comments at an Art Exhibition

Here is one done by Joan Miro’s great-great-granddaughter at the age of five or six.  If you stand far enough back you can see how colourful and lively it is,

But what about his one?  It looks like some distant cousin a few times removed of Vassily Kandinsky did it soon after a painful stomach operation.  You could just smell, as well as well as taste, the consequences of all that churning about still going on. 

I liken that painting over there, the one where the mother has chased down her son in the subway to clean his ears with a tissue and spit.  Wrong, alas.  Read the caption: a wild woman has throttled a child and threatens to cut its neck with a shard of pottery.  Are you sure about that? I could swear someone found a photo of the time my mother did that to me on our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, must have been in 1949.

Well, not too many years later, when I was almost eighteen and just starting to think about things, such as art and history, I went to the Met, walked into the room where a giant Jackson Pollack was hung, and I sat on a long stone bench and said to myself that I would not get up until the work made sense and proved it really was a work of art.  After less than two hours I gave up and left. Ever since, it has seemed to me that not such a long time need be expended, like today, in this exhibition.   

The bright colours there are striking.  Where? In the far corner on the left.  Looks like a semaphore flag, slashed diagonally.  Yes, but the colours, so bright and attractive.  Must mean something.

My most best favourite, hmmm, that’s not easy to say, but that thing over there in the corner, some kind of, wha’dya call it? a project or a projection or whatever.  Yes, that’s it.  What! No, you’re kiddin’ me, a fire extinguisher?  Well, I’ll be darned.

Did you vote for your favourite? They keep asking me. You are so negative, I wonder if you have any favourites, or even any you could bring yourself to look at again.  Now don’t get nasty, please.  Of course, I put in my ballot.  It’s the one with the dark girl facing away from the painter’s gaze and our observation.  Very skilfully done, and traditional.  Traditional?  Yes, there are several outstanding portraits of famous men with their heads seen from behind.  It’s as though the artist tried to capture not so much the personality of the model or the deep feelings welling up from within him or herself, but rather the subject stands as a medium through which the artist wants us to look out beyond the canvas, away from us, into the unseen dimensions at the very heart of consciousness.

Surely the winning candidate must have something you like.  Not really.  It only tells me what is fashionable in the art schools over the last few years.  The creator’s statement seems more important than the product of insight and technique.  Shows you how far someone could go with minimum skill and lack of insight.  I beg your pardon, but that is a gross insult to the judge and the committee, isn’t it?  I hope so.

No use expressing yourself until you have has some experiences worth leaving behind..  If you have never gone anywhere, done anything, and don’t visit museums to study and imitate what has proven itself, what’s the point?  Why waste our time?

All the great art of the nineteenth century has to struggle for acceptance.  The artists suffered in garrets and ruined their health with drink and drugs, dissipated their lives, committed suicide.  So you say.

It’s not the work itself, someone said, but the narrative behind it and the conversation it engenders.  What lies behind such a statement is, to be sure, a load of codswallop, as though some constructivist fool decided to do away with art altogether and replace it with social science gobbledigook.  If someone decides to kill him/herself an artist, then no matter what, whatever they do is a work of art.  And no one can gainsay this since, in post modernism, everybody’s opinion is as good as everyone else’s no matter how lacking in  substance, evidence or truth. The function of art, it is further asserted by those who make such assertions, the objective of art is to create controversy, debate and a whole lot of empty noise in public.  And yet, these are the self-same people who deny the validity of any Big or Master  Narrative, and conceive of a debate (there are no rules) or a dialogue (no one listens to the other side and constructs a rational reply) as ill-informed and uneducated voices shouting over each other: may the loudest voice win, or at least the last to croak into silence.

The child of twelve or thirteen walks around the exhibition hall thoughtfully.  Did you find any picture you like?  I liked almost all of them.  And what made you like them? They were really cool.  What about the others, the ones you didn’t like so well?  They were sort of ok but they weren’t cool.  Isn’t she clever?

Later the artist and the runners-up come to the stage to receive their awards.  Thank you, everyone, for liking my work.  It is really cool.  Next year, I will do the same picture again using different crayons.

Art should not have to be this or that, for this and that depend upon styles and tastes, ages and cultures.  If “should” is forbidden, then so, alas, are “beauty”, “truth” and “significance.”  But what about “skill” and “talent,” “insight” and “genius”? Perhaps “art” itself should go, since, from early in the twentieth century, it was overtaken by “design” and “ornament”.

The judge stood up to make her speech.  The exhibition hall went almost silent, except for the children still careering about in a mad frenzy of delight, and servers served the last glasses of wine and offered the final squares of cheese on toothpicks.  “Ahem.  It is my pleasure and honour to be here tonight.” The audience applauded politely.  “I have looked twice at these paintings, first, in the photographs you sent by email attachment, and then, here in your beautiful little city when I first arrived and walked through the hall.”  “Here, here,” several; enthusiasts murmured in a no otiose way.  “My feeling is that all these works should deserve awards”—titters of laughter—“but, of course, that is impossible—there would no funds left to pay me”—guffaws and nervous coughing—“so I will name only the third runner up, the second prize, and all the around winner.”  The audience drew in its breath in anticipation of the results. “Third runner-up is a painting I found delightfully provocative.”  Shouts of approval.  “The second prize goes to a work of art that shows how engaged the artist is in finding her place in life after many years of very difficult issues.”  Loud applause.  “And now, what you have all been waiting for, the over-all winner of the Art Awards goes to a painting that I found excruciatingly cool.”  A stunned silence.  Then shouts of “Cool, cool, cool!”  

A Set of Sayings and Anecdotes for 2017

Many years ago I asked whether the weathers of the world were all wrong, and now we know.  Every extreme has become a norm.  Records fall and the impossible becomes probable. 

Home is where you keep your stuff.  Home is where your friends and family support you.  Where am I?  Nowhere?  Wait another hundred years and then we’ll really know.

Before there was the internet, research meant reading books, when yiou could find them, copying copious notes from journals, virtually reproducing entire works, just in case you would shift your interests over the course of many years.  Before there were word-processors, there were typewriters, the kind you banged across the page, and thus had to produce whole thoughts and sentences in your mind before you began to write them down.  Before there was email, you received a letter, mulled it over several days, then produced an answer and posted it off.  Perhaps in three or four weeks, there might be a reply, and so the dialogue went, slowly, with much time between to think things through.  You hesitated long and hard before you made a telephone call because it was expensive and every minute counted, so that when you moved from one side of the world to the other, it was not likely you would ever see your friends and family again.

When we were graduate students, we sat around and talked, read each other’s essays and made comments, and if in the course of our own research we found something useful for our friends, we copied it out for them.  Knowledge was cumulative and not competitive. 

When we burned potatoes in the vacant lot, we called them mickeys.  No one knew why. Today, what we knew as meat patties and then as hamburgers, have down to burgers, as though one needed an adjective to tell you something was a beef burger or a cheese burger: Baloney!  Generic names are one thing, misreading the names of places another.

In the days of animal testing, the ponds near the university would swarm with tadpoles, frogs, guppies, minnows, goldfish and other little creatures; then came the ducks, wild and domesticated, who died of slimy coloured liquids that appeared out of nowhere.  We would circumlaculate (or peripondulate) to count the dead ones on the shore or hidden among the reeds.  It made a change from the nonsense and insults to knowledge going on in the modern halls of learning.

Seven small spiders in a corner of the shower.  One large spider looms over them, pounces and devours the group. So it seems.  The next morning, seven small spiders gradually consume the giant.  It takes them several days.  Then they face off against each other.  One by one they disappear, leaving one bloated giant.  Time to flush him away with one spray of the nozzle.

We used to watch the guppies, neon tetras  and angel fish in their five gallon tank, and we wondered how long their trail of excrement could be before it broke.  What started off a mark of ugliness and immodesty became a sign of wonder.  Could the little creature swim around more than twice with this parade of self-expression, or did it even know that it was for a moment or two so much more than itself, if not for itself then for us?  Perhaps it was a premonition of how my own life would reach its final stage.

What a shame to speak to God in terms He or She (or They or It) never heard of, as though you could play the same game as when you name your child with no regard to ancestry or etymology, let alone orthography and multi-lingual puns.  Even to leave out the “o” seems an affectation because those three letters are already meant to represent the Tetragrammaton; better perhaps to avoid pronouncing the unpronounceable, with the penultimate letter of dieu or the second t in gott as a glottal stop. 

Intelligence and intellectual do not mean the same thing, often quite the reverse.  Scholarship and research similarly can repel one another.  Authority matched with authoritarianism reveals the problem.  As does proud and prideful, fearful and fearsome.  In other words, the mind triumphs  over matter, if we are careful in what we say.

In 1954, having been cajoled into attending the first rock ’n’ roll concert organized by Alan Freid at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, I made a vow to have nothing to do with popular culture again.  I was a fourteen-year-old snob.  The raucous music offended me, the behaviour of the audience frightened me, and the whole situation made me uncomfortable.   With very rare exceptions, and those usually inadvertent, I have kept to this vow.  This makes it difficult to understand people who must draw analogies for history or politics or even science from popular music, professional sporting fixtures, films about vampires and zombies,  celebrity marriages and divorces, fashion-plate narcissists, stand-up comedians who trade on personal  insults and all the rest.

Every generation or two, or maybe century or so, there comes a moment when everything seems come unhinged, old certainties fall out of the tree of knowledge, and words that seemed as powerful as myths and gods grow hoarse.  The darkness shudders all around us.  Fools seems to dance along the highway in great processions of self-flagellation and self-righteous absurdity.  Great men bluster, splutter, croak and expectorate whenever they seek to gather us up in moral crusades against the enemy within.  Poets and musicians cower in the cellars.  Students claw over each other in search of authority and facts.  Time passes slowly and awkwardly.  Eventually, as predicted in some gallimaufry of  symbolic murmuring, long lost in the dreams and delusions of ignorant eons, the light begins to ooze out again.  The silence creeps out of its archaic cocoon.  As though awakening from a trance, tangled in the thorns of fairy tale magic, we peer into the unfamiliar landscape, and wonder if the creatures and sensations that lie across the horizon are really true.

Finally, it looks like my new book is going to press.  The notices are popping up on all sorts of online book sellers.

  

What I have noticed, looking through the book after a pretty long break, is that it is much more pertinent to what is going on in the world today than I imagined while doing the research and writing over the past five or six years.  The book explicitly sets out to examine the nature of the illusions that many prominent Jews—mostly well-known authors, actors, artists, journalists and scholars—believed they were safe in the France of the mid to late nineteenth century or even early decades of the twentieth elsewhere in Europe; but each one discovered—or was subjected to forces they did not expect or understand that proved their fame ephemeral and their own happiness an illusion.  Through recorded dreams, private anecdotes, inadvertently mentioned conversations and other seemingly trivial and irrelevant comments and remarks by their contemporaries, the nature of their inner lives is brought to the fore so that we can discuss them, see analogies, follow patterns, and knock open enigmas.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published February 1st 2017

Jews in an Illusion of Paradise Dust and Ashes

Volume One

 Comedians and Catastrophes

by Norman Simms

The focus of this volume is on essential themes, images and generic patterns, beginning with a Talmudic legend about four scholars. They, by means of daring mystical interpretations of Scripture, entered a Paradise, representing different means of imaginative reading, perception, memory and application of the law. One of them died, one went mad, another became a heretic and the other came back as a traditional exegete and teacher. Based on that legend, this book examines a small group of late 19th and early 20th century European Jewish intellectuals and artists in the light of their dreams, writings, and moments of crisis. These men and women, comedians in both the sense of stage actors and clowns or witty performers, believed they had entered a new secular and tolerant society, but discovered that there was no escape from their Jewish heritage and way of seeing the world. This monograph looks into the imperfect mirror of cultural experience, discovers a hazy world of illusions, dreams and nightmares on the other side of the looking glass, and sometimes constructs a midrashic conceit of the comical and grotesque screen between them.  

By careful readings of a variety of texts--recorded dreams, partly heard conversations, letters and journals, comments by contemporaries--the book attempts to being to the  surface of analytical discussion the inner life and imaginary experiences of the key players; and several apparently superficial metaphors (acrobats, mirrors, adventures under the sea) used in passing are plumbed for their significance and shown to form patterns of allusion and thus keys to our understanding of their deeply conflicted personalities.

Volume One looks at the basic themes of these processes of disillusionment and self-deception, while Volume Two examines a half dozen major examples of such personalities, such as Arthur Meyer, Aby Warburg, Bernard Berenson ,Sarah Bernhardt and a handful of others.

Hardback

ISBN-13:978-1-4438-1730-1

ISBN-10:1-4438-1730-9

Date of Publication:01/02/2017

Pages / Size:410 / A5

Price:£63.99